(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)
“There is an unnerving tension at the core of That Used to Be Us,” said David Frum in The New York Times. In their “enlightened and enlightening” new diagnosis of what ails America, columnist Thomas L. Friedman and foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum trot out a long list of innovative CEOs and consensus-seeking politicians whose example suggests that all hope is not lost. Yet the authors also undercut their cheerleading with sobering facts. Some 75 percent of military-age Americans, we learn, are now unqualified to enlist because they either haven’t finished high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit. The top 1 percent of Americans, meanwhile, takes in roughly a quarter of all annual income—double its share of 25 years ago.
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Yet there’s a deeper problem, said John Gray in the Financial Times. While these authors urge the U.S. to reclaim its position as the globe’s model economy, “the world has already moved on.” Globalization had produced “new varieties of capitalism, some more successful than the American version.” Even if Washington were fixed by a radical rewrite of the U.S. Constitution, the best that could be hoped for would be a more gradual national decline. Americans still seem to believe that “the rise and fall of nations is something that happens to other people.” They’re wrong.
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SpaceX breaks Starship losing streak in 10th testspeed read The Starship rocket's test flight was largely successful, deploying eight dummy satellites during its hour in space
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”